Here we are at the beginning of spring, and while we are in a country in the midst of their school year and poised for springtime frolicking, I cannot, cannot shake the back-to-school feeling. It’s definitely due to many of my much-loved friends from home sharing photos of conkers and their children starting the new (or not-so) adventures of homeschooling and twenty-five years of ingrained September vibes. But I think it’s also due to my end of August baby, who will…

Every time I speak to parents about sleep, it’s the one thing that repeatedly comes up as having always have knocked them for six when it came to becoming a parent. We are told often as new parents that “just wait, one day you’ll wake up and you’ll have slept the whole night!” and that’s the end, close the book, we’ve ticked the sleep box and off we go into the sunset.

I could shout it from the rooftops; sleep is not linear. It’s not a track clacking…

The 21st approaches, and with it comes midsummer or midwinter depending on your side of the hemisphere. The last solstice we celebrated in December was winter, but come the 21st June we will be celebrating midwinter once again as we spend our first month in Australia.

The bright mornings. The dawn chorus waking us gently from our slumber (yes, a little earlier than I’d hope for). Drawing the curtains back to see a slow explosion of green, small snatches of blue and purple as the wisteria in our garden begins to open. Our drives into town are now peppered with big and small white and woolly friends, sheep and their small lambs appearing, and we said hello to some small ducklings yesterday as they bobbed down the river with their mama.

Welcome to spring. I’m so excited to share with you the first in a series of seasonal guides, The Family Collective Guide to Spring. Celebrating and living with the seasons is something that is so important to us as a family, and the ways in which we raise our daughter. We find so much joy in tying our lives to what is happening outside, in creating celebrations and traditions that we plan to rediscover each year. Memories of our daughter are similarly intertwined, the blossoms float in the background as I think of our first park picnics. The world outside is ochre as we chopped apples together to make a cake, small mouse-like nibbles in each and every slice.

In our little patch of Suffolk over the last few days, it really feels like spring has well and truly landed. The sky is at its bluest, and it feels glorious sit and bask in the first warmth after winter. More likely than not, its not going to last too long before we at least get some spring showers, so we are making the most of it all.

Sometimes, that might be the simple act of hanging washing outside to dry. Or changing up our menu a little for fresher food. Every season we pull out new…

I’m returning to our play space series with another room in our little house, the kitchen. The kitchen is actually my favourite room in the house, it gets so much light during the day, there’s actually room for everything we need and its the nicest rental kitchen we have certainly ever had. Saying this, I felt like it was fairly difficult to make child-friendly. We don’t have room (or money) for a learning tower, nor much space for child-accessible areas, but it’s surprised me just how much we could do when I shifted my thinking and worked on it a little…